Treasure Hunt Tales: The Star of the South & Captain Antifer. Жюль Верн
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Название: Treasure Hunt Tales: The Star of the South & Captain Antifer
Автор: Жюль Верн
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788027223367
isbn:
He had finished this, and was preparing to go on deck, when his cabin door opened.
Kamylk appeared.
“Have you got your position?” he asked.
“Yes, your Excellency.”
“Give it to me.”
The captain held out the sheet of paper on which was the working.
Kamylk looked it through attentively, as if he would fix the position of the islet in his memory.
“You will keep this paper,” he said. “And as to the log-book you have been keeping for the last fifteen months in which you have recorded our course—”
“No one will ever have that, your Excellency.”
“To be quite certain of that, destroy it at once.”
“As you please.”
The captain took the book in which were registered the directions taken by the brigantine during her lengthy cruise on so many different seas; and he tore out the leaves and burnt them in the flame of a lantern.
Some hours were spent at anchor. About five o’clock clouds began to appear on the western horizon; and through their narrow intervals the setting sun shot his streams of rays, which strewed the sea with scales of gold.
The captain shook his head, like a sailor whom the appearance of the weather did not please.
“Your Excellency,” he said, “there is a strong breeze in those heavy clouds, perhaps a storm to-night! This islet affords no shelter, and before it is too dark, I should like to get a dozen miles to windward.”
“And there is nothing to keep us here!” said the Pasha.
“We will go, then.”
“For the last time there is no need for you to verify your observations for latitude or longitude?”
“No, your Excellency; I am as sure of my position as I am of being my mother’s child.”
“Get under way, then.”
The preparations did not take long. The anchor left the ground, and was hauled up to the cathead; the sails were set, and the vessel headed north-west.
Kamylk watched the unknown islet as they left it until it disappeared in the shades of the night. But the rich Egyptian could find it again when he pleased, and with it the treasure he had buried in it, a treasure worth four millions sterling in gold, and diamonds, and precious stones.
CHAPTER IV.
Every Saturday about eight o’clock in the evening Captain Antifer would smoke his pipe—a regular furnace, very short in the stem—and plunge into a blue rage, from which he would emerge quite red, an hour afterwards, when he had relieved himself at the expense of his neighbour and friend Gildas Tregomain. And what caused this rage? Simply his not being able to find what he wanted on one of the maps in an old atlas!
“Confound this latitude!” he would exclaim. “If it even ran through the furnace of Beelzebub, I should have to follow it from one end to the other!”
And until he put this plan into execution Captain Antifer dug his nails into the said latitude, and punctured it with pencil-points and compass-prods, until it was as full of holes as a coffee-strainer.
The latitude which brought down Antifer’s objurgations was written at the end of a piece of parchment which was almost as yellow as an old Spanish flag:
Twenty-four degrees fifty-nine minutes north.
Above this, in a corner of the parchment, were these words in red ink—“Let my boy never forget this.”
And Captain Antifer would exclaim:
“Never fear, my good old father, I have not forgotten it, nor will I ever forget it. But may the three patron saints of my baptism bless me if I know what use it can ever be!”
It is the 23rd of February 1862, and this evening Captain Antifer is behaving himself as usual. He is in a howling rage; he is swearing like a topman when a rope slips through his hands; he is grinding away at the pebble which he has in his mouth. He is pulling away at his pipe, which has gone out twenty times, and which he has lighted again and again from a box of matches; he has thrown his atlas into one corner, his chair into another; he has smashed a big shell on the mantelpiece; he has stamped so as to shake down flakes of whitewash from the ceiling; and in a voice accustomed to be heard above a roaring gale he shouts:
“Nanon! Enogate!” making a speaking-trumpet out of a roll of cardboard.
Enogate and Nanon, the one busy knitting, the other in front of the kitchen stove, judged it time to put a stop to their troubled domestic elements.
One of the good old houses of St. Malo, built of granite, facing the Rue des Hautes Salles; a ground-floor and two storeys, each containing two rooms, and the upper one, at the back, overlooking the road round the ramparts. There you could see its walls of granite, thick enough to defy the projectiles of the olden days, the narrow windows with the iron bars, the massive gate of heart of oak, ornamented with iron fastenings, and furnished with a knocker you could hear at Saint Servan when Captain Antifer had it in hand: its slate roof pierced with dormer windows, from which the old sailor’s telescope was occasionally visible. This house—half a casemate, half a fortress—adjoining an angle of the ramparts which surround the town, has a superb view; to the right, Grand-Bé, a corner of Cézembre, the Pointe du Decollé, and Cape Frehel; to the left, the jetty and the mole, the mouth of the Rance, the beach of Prieuré, near Dinard, and the grey dome of Saint Servan.
Formerly St. Malo was an island, and perhaps Captain Antifer regretted the time when he would have been called an islander. But the ancient Aaron has become a peninsula, and he has to make the best of it. Besides, one has a right to be proud at being a child of this Breton city which has given so many great men to France—among others, Duguay-Trouin, whose statue our worthy mariner saluted every time he crossed the square, Lamennais, although this writer in no way interested him, and Chateaubriand, whose best work he did not know, and whose proud and modest tomb on the little island of Grand-Bé we cannot pass without mention.
Captain Antifer (Pierre Servan Malo) was then forty-six years old. Eighteen months before, he had retired from the sea with a certain independence which sufficed for himself and his people. A few thousand francs in the funds had resulted from his service on the two or three ships he had commanded, which had always hailed from St. Malo. These ships belonged to Le Baillif and Co., and traded in the Channel, in the North Sea, in the Baltic, and even in the Mediterranean. Before attaining this lofty position, Captain Antifer had been about the world a good deal. A good seaman, very enterprising, hard master to himself and others, never sparing himself, his courage beyond reproach, his obstinacy unyielding, the obstinacy of a true Breton. Did he regret the sea? No, for he had left it in the prime of life. Had his health anything to do with this resolve? No, for he СКАЧАТЬ